Episode 127: Leaving a Job I Love and My Role Is Being Eroded

Hey guys, I love the show! Thanks so much for keeping episodes coming every week.

Some background:

I work for a small, established company based in a small city with a growing tech scene. We have about 20 employees, 5 of which make up the engineering team and it’s been a great experience. My role is primarily being a full stack developer working on our web application, but since we’re a small company, I’ve been able to explore some other responsibilities like analyzing data for the marketing team and working with the sales staff to build custom solutions for select clients. I started working here as an intern while still in college almost 6 years ago. I feel my initial salary out of college started a bit low, but I’ve received an 8-10% raise each year I’ve been a full time employee (without having fight for them)–so I think I’m catching up.

My question is, will I be stunting my career or making myself seem less hirable by staying here too long? I’ve clearly found a great place to work so leaving here would be difficult. I’m also concerned that I’m beginning to run out of skills to acquire here. It sounds easy to leave a job you hate, but how/when should you leave a job that’s this good to you?

Hi Jamison and Dave,

tl;dr:

The role I was originally hired for is slowly being eroded - what should I do?

Longer version:

I have been working for my current company for a little over a year now.
Things were going really well at first, I liked the team I was on, the work
(backend) was interesting and I was learning a lot from my colleagues.

Unfortunately, due to corporate machinations, my team was dissolved as part
of a reorganization and scattered to seperate, mostly frontend focused, teams.

Originally I was told that I would still be doing effectively the same type
of work on my new team as on my old, and this has been mostly true. However,
over the course of the last few weeks my new manager has gradually been
announcing changes in the direction the team is taking as a whole and talking
to me specifically about working more on frontend related tasks and upskilling,
as I have almost no frontend experience.

I have tried to make it clear that I have no interest in doing this but my
manager is still pushing for it. I am currently still doing mostly backend
work with a little frontend, but I feel like my days are numbered.
There are other teams with a more backend focus, but I feel that my manager
partly wants to keep me in the short term for some necessary backend work and
in the long term is hoping I will acquiesce on doing more frontend work.

How should I navigate this situation? It feels like I sinking in quicksand